Everywhere and Nowhere

Your mind is everywhere. When you’re watching TV or trying to read a book or attempting to have a conversation with your mom, your mind feels like it’s floating on a really thick clump of smog. And yet if someone was to ask you what was on your mind, you could not begin to tell them, because you have no idea.

Some nights you stare at the television as reruns of The Office play consistently for hours. Netflix doesn’t even bother to ask if you are still watching after four episodes, it knows damn well you never even started.

Some mornings you don’t remember driving to work. You understand that you own a car and that you began the morning in your underpants and are now behind a desk with slacks on (hopefully), but you couldn’t retrace your drive if you had to.

Bouts of anxiety come in waves of feeling perpetually high; always in a state of uncertainty, drunk on the possibility of situations that will never occur. It’s staring straight through someone in an attempt to hold on to what they’re saying, and grasping to keywords in hopes of pasting the conversation together later.

Anxiety is checking your phone while sitting in front of the TV and surfing the web because focusing on one thing would leave too much head space to contemplate more intense feelings that you aren’t equipped to handle.

Or are you?

I can’t tell you how to fix your anxiety, because I don’t think there’s necessarily a “cure”. But I can tell you how to manage it: speak up.

Mental illness thrives on secrecy.

Your family doesn’t have to understand it.

The greatest piece of knowledge a loved one of someone with anxiety can have is understanding that they won’t understand.

We don’t understand anxiety ourselves, which is what makes it so much more frustrating.

But it is possible to manage.

If you want to go the route of medication, and it works for you, great. If you want to try to manage it on your own holistically, perfect.

It’s not about how you manage your anxiety, it’s about deciding to manage it in the first place.

It’s about deciding to get healthy and take the initiative to create a resplendent head space for your thoughts to live in.

So make the decision or don’t make any other plans, because anxiety will take you everywhere and nowhere at all.